Edward Brooke-Hitching - The Madmans Gallery: The Strangest Paintings, Sculptures and Other Curiosities from the History of Art

The line between the real and the fictitious is blurred as the young subject emerges wide-eyed into the world, in Spanish painter Pere Borrell del Casos Escaping Criticism (1874), one of the greatest works of trompe loeil (trick the eye) art ever created.

Art evokes the mystery without which the world would not exist.

Ren Magritte

O n 1 July 1936 the great surrealist artist Salvador Dal stood before a crowd at Londons New Burlington Galleries, as part of the first International Surrealism Exhibition. Dressed in a diving suit and clutching two dogs on leads in one hand and a billiard cue in the other, he launched into a passionate lecture on surrealist art. Very little of this was picked up by the audience, though, for Dal was also wearing a sealed copper-and-brass diving helmet. This sort of thing was to be expected at an exhibition that had opened with a lecture given by the surrealism co-founder Andr Breton dressed entirely in green, smoking from a green pipe, while the poet Dylan Thomas went around offering guests teacups filled with boiled string (Do you like it weak or strong?). Dal continued with his muffled address, gesturing wildly as people strained to listen, until his colleagues realised that his frantic movements were actually appeals for help: he was suffocating inside the helmet. The poet David Gascoyne leapt forward and managed to jimmy open the helmet with the billiard cue, as the audience applauded, thinking it was all part of the show.

It was from reflecting on this curious episode and other similarly strange stories from the history of art that the idea for this book came about in 2015, a particularly strong year of comparable artistic oddness. Banksy had just opened his Dismaland Bemusement Park exhibition in North Somerset, England, converting an entire derelict seaside tourist venue into a dark and twisted parody of Disneyland, drawing over 150,000 visitors from around the world. Elsewhere, performance artist Stelarc was growing a human ear and attaching it to his own arm, with the idea of adding a microphone to eavesdrop on conversations. (Ears were a particular trend in the same year, the artist Diemut Strebe exhibited Sugababe, a living bioengineered replica of Vincent van Goghs severed ear using genetic samples taken from the van Gogh family.) for this and other such episodes).

While Stelarc was growing his ear and Seora Gimnez was enduring another year of ridicule, I was putting together material for an illustrated book called The Madmans Library (2020), which collected the strangest books and manuscripts literary curiosities as a way of examining the more obscure and intriguing pockets of literary history. The antiquarian book world, with its looming walls of dark leather bindings and obscure jargon, can seem like a closed private club to the uninitiated. But from growing up in a rare antiquities shop as the son of a dealer, the lesson one learns is that a historical curiosity with a captivating story can make even the most complex area of specialist study instantly accessible. The art world can possess that same intimidating complexity of scholarship and critical theory; but just as with literature, there is, of course, a riotous, humorous history of genius, eccentricity and imaginative experimentation to explore, as stories like these few examples go to show.

While the bulk of art history books focus on the revolutionary and traditionally revered works, The Madmans Gallery is intended to offer an alternative guided tour of art history, focusing instead on the oddities, the forgotten, the freakish, all with stories that offer glimpses of the lives of their creators and their eras. There are, of course, a number of infamous works included in these ranks, but it is not for their masterpiece status that they were selected to be hung in this hypothetical gallery of curiosities; rather they were chosen for a strangeness salient in both their time and today. The inclusion of these notorious works is counterbalanced by pieces that will hopefully make for new discoveries to those reading these pages. For example, for every Hieronymus Bosch triptych (see ) and thought to be based on a lost original by the virtuoso himself.

Marchesa Luisa Casati in 1922. A figure of the Belle poque and muse of surrealist and Futurist artists including Man Ray, Casati endeavoured to be a living work of art, and collected wax likenesses of herself in wigs of her own hair. Her dress, commissioned from the costume designer of the Ballets Russes, featured tiny electric bulbs that once short-circuited and gave her such a great electric shock that the blast caused her to somersault backwards.

Why sign a work with ones name? In 1508, the German painter Lucas Cranach the Elder (c.1472-1553) was granted his own coat of arms a winged serpent which he thereafter used as his signature, like this example of 1514 (left). By the 1870s James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) was signing his paintings and prints with his butterfly design, which he even used for letters, notes and invitation cards. His butterfly symbol (below left) was so popular that customers who had bought his paintings before he began using it would bring back their purchase for him to add the butterfly.

What was also important when choosing the artworks to feature here was to make a global sweep for curiosities, to show the delightful, drunken variety of creative imaginations across vastly different traditions, geographies and eras. In Japan, for example, we find the starkly beautiful kusozu (decomposition watercolours) of the thirteenth to nineteenth centuries, akin to the European memento mori as reminders of our mortal frailty (see ), works of art worn by those fighting fire. In Chinese history, too, the eccentric artist lives as large as it does in Europe. When we think of paint-hurling artists we tend to consider twentieth-century figures like Jackson Pollock (1912-56); when we should also add Wang Hsia (fl. 785-805), whose work sadly has not survived. Known as Ink-flinger Wang, the Register of Notable Painters of the Tang Dynasty